


The Intruder

by manatee_patronus



Category: Ringu | The Ring - All Media Types, The Ring (2002)
Genre: A girl is alone in her townhouse, Dark and Stormy Night, Dreams and Nightmares, and spooky stuff starts happening, because Samara wants to be heard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 19:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9673682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manatee_patronus/pseuds/manatee_patronus
Summary: On a dark and stormy night, Athena Brunnen is alone in her townhouse, watching TV and trying to do her homework. As the night progresses, frightening and mysterious occurrences increase her suspicion of being followed - a suspicion which she traces to her friend's unexplained death the year before.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The story is finished, but I'm still reading through for spelling/grammar/general edits! Feel free to let me know if you see something awkward.

On a warm and rainy night in late August, Athena Brunnen was propped up on several pillows in bed with her graduate-level accounting textbook open across her knees. Despite her determination to finish the chapter before the seminar tomorrow, she found that her eyes kept drifting from the book to the screen, where one of her favorite movies, _Maleficent_ , was on TV.

She knew that she should probably turn off the TV so that she could focus, but the chapter she was reading was so dry and boring. In the end, she rationalized keeping the TV on by saying to herself that it was a reward for getting through the chapter – she’d read two paragraphs, watch five minutes, read during the commercial break, and then watch some more…

Athena yawned and pressed the center button of her phone, which sat on top of the blanket beside her. 10:17. Her boyfriend was supposed to come over to spend the night when his shift at the Marriott hotel ended, but she was starting to doubt her ability to stay awake. She swiped into her phone, tapped the messages icon, and sent a text to Sean:

“Hey sweet man, how’re things at the hotel? You think your boss’ll let you off soon?”

As she put her phone back in sleep mode, another commercial came on. She hopped out of bed, eager to get a snack downstairs before the movie came back on. Slipping on her shoes (because the wood floor of the town house was still rough in parts) and grabbing her phone, she closed the door of her bedroom behind her and made her way carefully down the steep, narrow staircase.

Halfway down, where the stairs levelled out into a small landing before continuing down in the opposite direction, an oval window looked out into the small garden behind the house. Athena paused beside it and tried to see out, but the rain ran too thickly down the glass, like dark tears.

Through the silence of the house, she could hear the dark rumble of thunder, seeming to bubble up slowly from the earth all around, and then, blurred by the streams of rain on the window, she saw a flash of lightning in the distance.

Soundlessly, Athena padded the rest of the way down the stairs, put a Pop-Tart in the toaster oven, and started to make herself a margarita. She was measuring the pink mix into a liquid measuring cup when she heard a scratching noise at her front door, loud enough to hear over the pounding of rain on the roof and windows.

Leaving the measuring cup on the island counter, Athena stepped into the front hall and peered curiously at the door. To her left, the sofas and armchairs in the living room cast hunched shadows that seemed to cower away from the light streaming from the kitchen.

The scratching continued, softly but insistently.

“Hello?” Athena called cautiously.

The scratching continued without any pause or alteration in rhythm. Somehow this soothed Athena. She figured that one of the neighborhood’s stray cats must be on her doorstep, drenched to the skin, scratching to be let into the warm. If she weren’t so allergic to cats, she would have welcomed the guest – she briefly imagined cuddling in bed with the cat while watching the movie – but in any case, the porch had an overhang, which should be sufficient shelter for the cat.

Suddenly Athena’s phone rang, making her jump. Giving her head a shake, she walked over and answered it dazedly without looking to see who it was.

“Hello?” she said, leaning on the island counter.

“Athena!” her mom exclaimed on the other end of the line. “I’m glad I got you. You’re a hard woman to get ahold of these days.”

Athena jumped again when her Pop-Tart sprang out of the toaster with a metallic snap.

“Yeah,” she said, trying to suppress a note of irritation both at her mom’s accusatory tone and at the loud noise of the toaster. “I told you grad school was going to keep me busier this year. Last year was OK because of some of the introductory classes, but this year I have all of the important classes, plus work and my capstone project…but anyway, how have things been with you?”

Her guilt trip of Athena forgotten, her mom began to happily complain about her annoying coworkers and rude customers at work, Athena’s little sister’s stubbornness with regard to learning how to read (“I wonder where she gets _that_ from,” Athena mused jokingly), and recount how she had soundly beaten Athena’s grandfather at Scrabble earlier that morning.

Athena talked about her own week, leaving out all of her romantic rendezvous with Sean, while finishing her preparation of the margarita. She turned the blender on high-speed and jogged over to sit on the stairs so that she’d still be able to hear her mom.

“What’s that noise? You blending something?”

“Yeah, a margarita.”

“Are you by yourself?” her mom asked.

“Yes.”

“Quite the lush you’re becoming, my dear!”

“Haha,” Athena said sardonically over her mother’s laughter. “You’d want a margarita too if you –“

At the front door, which Athena was now facing from her seat on the step, the scratching noise resumed, much louder than before. She hadn’t noticed that it had stopped, what with all of the noise that she had been making in the kitchen, but now that the blender had stopped, she could tell that it certainly wasn’t a cat at the door.

The noise was clearly coming from about chest height, far above where a cat could plausibly reach. Athena felt a cold swoop of fear in her chest.

“Athena? Hon, you still there?”

“Yeah, Mom, give me just a second, I think someone’s messing around at the door.”

As Athena lowered the phone and moved cautiously toward the door, she heard the distant voice of her mother saying, “Be careful. Don’t open the door for anybody.”

Athena halted on the rectangular rug, listening to the rhythmic crunch of the wood on her door. She looked at the doorknob and was relieved to see that the door and deadbolt were locked.

“Hey,” she said, in what she hoped was an aggressive, intimidating voice. The scratching stopped, but this only unsettled her more, as it confirmed that the cause of the scratching was a sentient being who could listen…and potentially be a threat.

“Who’s there?” Athena said fiercely to the silence on the far side of the door. “Why are you scratching my door?”

No answer. After a full minute, Athena wondered if whoever it was had run off. Silently, she lifted herself on tip-toe to look out of the peephole…

All she could see was total blackness outside. But wait – was it just her imagination, or did there appear to be a strip of shadow even blacker than the rest, moving slightly just before the door? She squinted and pressed her eye more firmly against the peephole.

BANG BANG BANG! 3 loud knocks punished the wood of the door and sent Athena stumbling back with a yelp of surprise.

“Get away from my house!” Athena yelled. “I’m armed” – a lie – “and I’ll call the police!”

Again, there was no answer, but Athena heard the unmistakable sound of feet plodding away quickly over the pavement.

Shaking, Athena touched the lock of the door one more time to reassure herself and lifted the phone back to her ear.

“Mom?” she said weakly.

Her mother heaved a sigh of relief on the other end of the line. “I was starting to freak out. Did they go away, whoever they were?”

“Yeah, I heard them run off…It’s just weird, they never said anything – they were just scratching away on the door…”

“Has something like this happened before?” her mom asked.

“No,” Athena said immediately, a half-lie. It had never been as bad as tonight, but there had been times over the past year – ever since Ellie Keen had died – when Athena had felt as though she were being watched or followed. Sometimes, when she passed empty, dark rooms, she felt as though someone hidden watched her from within the room, but if she hurried to turn on the light, she would find the room to be empty and undisturbed.

It was only when she lingered too long before mirrors or turned-off television screens that she occasionally spied a flit of movement behind her, as though someone had been in the room with her the whole time – someone who could only exist in the world of reflections and illusions.

“Well, if it does keep up, definitely alert the police,” her mom was saying. “I’ve heard of people sneaking around, harassing people at night, to try to get a good idea of how much security a place has before they try to rob it.”

Athena assured her mom that she would talk to the police if there was another incident, and she promised to call her back tomorrow night, too.

“Just so I know you’re OK!” her mom insisted.

“Uh-huh,” Athena said. “I know the real reason is that you can’t bear a day without my conversational charms because I’m the most interesting girl in the world.”

Her mom laughed. “Like the Dos XXs man, except you drink margaritas.”

“I don’t always read accounting textbooks and eat Pop-Tarts,” Athena put on the deep voice from the Dos XXs commercial, “But when I do, I drink cheap strawberry margaritas.”

Laughing again, her mom said, “All right, enough playing around, go get back to work and make those A’s. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Smiling, Athena hung up the phone and set it down on the counter again. She emptied the slushy contents of her blender into a tall souvenir cup from a Nats game and put her now-only-lukewarm Pop-Tarts on a plate.

Her phone buzzed. She picked it up and read Sean’s text:

“Gotta stay ‘til at least 12 :/ Waiting for Emmanuel to relieve me. A lot of people coming in since it’s parents’ weekend @ GMU. Think you can wait up for me? :-*”

She responded, “Lolz I’ll try my best but accounting’s putting me to sleep. Just crawl in next to me if I’m out when you get here. We can do a bagel date in the morning before class.”

Sean sent three emoticons of a smiley face licking its lips and one more kissy face.

Athena put her phone on her Pop-Tart plate, grabbed her cup in her other hand, and walked back into the hallway to return upstairs. She felt a warm breeze on her face and stopped in her tracks. A panic unlike any she had ever known gripped her when she turned and saw that the front door was open. The wind was blowing some of the raindrops inside, where they puddled on the wood floor by the door.

Athena set down her plate and cup and ran forward to push the door shut at once, though she knew that the damage was already done and she didn’t mean the water on the floor, either.

She put her back to the door, breathing heavily, and faced the inside of her house, which felt like hostile territory now. Her eyes drifted down to the puddle that she now stood in, and kept drifting…into the living room. There was water pooled on the floor stretching at least to the entrance to the living room, and now that Athena considered it, she didn’t think that the wind had been blowing hard enough to dampen the floor that far inside the house.

Having nothing better at her disposal, Athena took the umbrella from beside the door, gripped it in her hands like a bat, and approached the entrance to the living room. She counted the shadows of familiar objects, trying to detect an alien presence. There was her lumpy couch, the low coffee table, her reading armchair, her tall and lean lamp by the entertainment center.

Athena’s stomach clenched. There was someone standing by the window, looking back at her. Even though she could not make out a face in the dark, she _felt_ the stare and thought the shadow looked human-shaped, though more hunched somehow. Raising her umbrella, she quickly swiped her hand just inside the room to hit the light switch.

There, where the figure had been, was nothing but Athena’s long, velvet window curtain, swaying slightly as though it had just been touched.

Athena wondered if she had mistaken the curtain for the human silhouette, but she didn’t see how that could be: the figure she had seen had been _shorter_ than her, while the curtain hung down from close to the ceiling.

Athena moved cautiously into the room and discovered yet another mystery. Because the living room was carpeted, she was able to see a set of wet footprints on it. But they did not at all follow the path that she would have expected. First, it surprised her to see from the clear toe marks that the intruder had bare feet. Next, and most bewilderingly, Athena could see that the footprints led from the entertainment center to the hallway (where they turned into puddles on the wood floor) and then from the hallway to the place just in front of the curtain where Athena had seen the figure. There were no footprints leading _to_ the entertainment center. For all Athena could tell, the intruder had materialized in front of the television and then unlocked and opened her door from the inside.

She stepped closer to the television and saw a few drops of water running down from the black, convex screen and pooling on the glass top of the entertainment center.

Remembering all too well the scares that she had received from reflective surfaces before, Athena immediately turned her back to the screen. Now the footprints were gone. Athena blinked and gave her head a shake. She bent down and touched the carpet precisely where she had seen a footprint moments before, but the carpet was dry and unstained. In the hallway, there were no puddles on the floor.

Determined that she wasn’t imagining things, Athena went from room to room in her house, furiously opening closet doors and even cabinets. Her anger helped her avoid looking at the possibility that she was unhinged, that she didn’t know the difference between reality and fiction anymore.

A year ago, when she’d confided in a friend about her paranoia when it had first started, the friend had said cautiously and tactfully, “Grief can have lots of strange side effects…maybe it’d help to talk to a professional?”

But Athena had known, even then, that she didn’t need therapy – because she wasn’t grieving. Of course, she was sad that Ellie had died, but she hadn’t known her well enough to be traumatized by her death – which was a sadness in itself. She would have liked to know Ellie better, and had they had longer together, they may have become good friends.

Ellie had sat beside her in her required philosophy class the previous year – Political and Social Thought. She was blonde, sporty, and pink-faced with health. She wore the sorts of fragile clothes, tight in strange (but fashionable, apparently) places, which suited petite girls like herself but would have made Athena look like an ogre – and it was easy to see from her clothes, her phone, and the laptop of science-fictiony thinness that she brought to class that she was rich.

Overall, she was exactly the sort of person with whom Athena ordinarily had difficulty developing friendships (due to different class and social backgrounds), but Ellie ended up defying Athena’s expectations. She didn’t look down her nose at Athena’s thrift store dresses or thick, shabby laptop. She didn’t talk about clothes or other vapid subjects – instead, on the first day of class, when their young, Irish professor walked in and flashed a handsome smile at them all, Ellie had leaned over and said, “Personally, I think I’m going to be doing a lot of political and social thought about that ass. Oh my god.”

Athena had laughed, appreciating Ellie’s immediate frankness and comfort with lewd humor. From then on, jokes blossomed between them, sometimes about the things they would do to the professor and occasionally about other things like their shared passion for Harry Potter.

Despite their silly conversations and the fun they had together, Ellie and Athena never got together outside of class. Just when Athena was thinking of asking Ellie if she wanted to hang out sometime, Ellie was absent for a few days. She came back after missing two days, but she looked like hell – skinnier than usual, with dark circles under her eyes and the pink gone from her cheeks.

“Hey Athena,” she’d said in a strained voice, not her usual easygoing one. “Would you like to come to my apartment tonight? I’d like to talk to you about something. We can also drink beer and watch a shitty chick flick.” She smiled feebly.

Athena agreed, so that night she walked across the street from campus and entered Ellie’s sumptuous apartment that her parents paid for. They kicked back on the couch with their beers, watched _Legally Blonde_ , getting sillier the more they drank, and in general having a great time, until Ellie stumbled down the hall to get popcorn.

Athena heard her give a strangled yell halfway down the hall, and she sprinted over to her – knocking her hip against the table – worried that Ellie had fallen and hurt herself badly in her drunken state. Instead, she found her trembling beside one of the doors leading off the hall.

“She’s in there – she’s in there!”

Athena hugged her and made shushing noises. “Who? Who’s in there?”

Ellie squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, sobbing. “I don’t know, she’s been following me. Can you look, please?”

Athena had no clue what to make of this. Maybe Ellie had taken some kind of hallucinogenic drug before she had arrived. Still, she let go of Ellie and looked through the doorway, and then flicked the light switch on. The room – a guest bedroom – was empty. Athena showed Ellie to try to comfort her. However, Ellie still stared warily at a black sweater hanging on a hook on the closet door, as though she couldn’t believe that that was all it was.

The girls went the rest of the way to the kitchen together, and then Ellie began to explain why she was in such a state.

“I’m sorry I’m like this,” she sobbed. “I’d hoped that if you came over, that everything would be OK, I thought maybe all I needed was company, but it’s real…it’s not just in my head.” She wiped her eyes and bowed her head. “I think I’m going to die, Athena.”

“What?” Athena dropped the popcorn that she was holding back into the bowl. “Why would you say that?”

Ellie hesitated and seemed to gather herself, apparently unsure of where to begin. “My boyfriend was Noel Owens,” she said quietly. “Did you know him?”

Athena shook her head, feeling a chill from noticing the past tense.

“We’d been together since high school – 5 years – and suddenly, last year, he withdrew. He wouldn’t return my calls or emails. He didn’t open his door when I went to see him. Later that week he killed himself – they found him in bed, overdosed on sleeping pills with electrical tape over his eyes.”

Athena didn’t know what to say, it was so horrible.

“And he never told you he was depressed or…anything?”

Ellie shook her head. “Nothing. It wasn’t like him. He had gone through bouts of depression before and I’d always help him through them. This was something else.”

“What do you mean?” Athena said.

“I think he was trying to protect me.” Ellie sniffed and wiped some tears from her cheek. “I think that’s why he shut me out. But I didn’t know that at first, and it drove me crazy. I felt like it was my fault, like I could have done something – that I _must_ have done something wrong, in order to make him think that he couldn’t come to me for help.

“But anyway, after his funeral, they had me come to his apartment because a lot of my stuff was still there. And…I found a strange thing. In the drawer above the one where I kept my clothes, I found an envelope that had a VHS tape in it – an unlabeled tape. But on the envelope, it said in his handwriting: ‘Don’t watch.’ And then, in the envelope along with the tape, there were some drawings…really weird stuff. Stick people with hair over their faces, dead horses, a ladder. I had no clue what it was about. But I took it.”

“Did you watch it?” Athena said immediately.

Ellie popped a few popcorn kernels into her mouth and sucked on them thoughtfully. “Not for a year,” she said. “I was tempted, many times, because I wanted to understand. I was so sure that this tape, whatever it was, had something to do with his death, but I also didn’t want to disobey one of his final written wishes…’Don’t watch.’ For all I knew, it could have been some really personal video of something he didn’t want anyone to know about. Or it could have been something really messed up like – like – I don’t know, some kind of messed up porn – and I didn’t want to ruin my memory of him. But eventually, I couldn’t stand not knowing. 6 days ago I watched it.”

“And what was on it?” Athena asked.

“Really weird stuff…some of it I recognized from the drawings. The horses, the ladder. It was like a bunch of images taken from someone’s sad life…” She shook her head, looking at the bowl but also seeming to look beyond it. “Then the phone rang.”

“Your cell phone?”

“Yeah. Right when it shut off. And then this voice whispered, ‘Seven days.’ I tried to say something, to get the person to talk to me, but the line just cut after that.”

“Do you think it might have been a solicitor?” Athena asked, though she knew that this wasn’t likely.

“No. I knew, from the moment I picked up the phone – even before she spoke – that someone knew I had watched this tape. That’s what the call was. And I didn’t know what she meant –“

“You know it’s a woman?” Athena interrupted.

“I think it’s the same girl who’s been following me,” Ellie shivered. “But anyway, I didn’t know what she meant at first, but it’s slowly started to dawn on me…I think I’m going to die on the seventh day. Tomorrow.”

Athena was silent for a moment. But then she said, “You don’t know that. A videotape can’t kill you.”

“It did with Noel,” Ellie said.

“But that was suicide.”

“I think,” Ellie said carefully, “I think he did it early because of how intense things got. You see, things have gotten gradually crazier each day…closer to complete dissociation I guess. The first day or two, I just saw stuff that would strongly remind me of something in the video – like the ladder, going nowhere. But then stuff got worse.” She shivered again. “There was blood in my bathtub, it smelled like rust and it had this thick hair in it…and then there were maggots in my sandwich two days ago…and then, last night.” She opened her mouth, but words failed her. Instead, she took the sleeve of her shirt and pulled it up over her forearm. There was an angry, red handprint there – like a burn.

Athena placed a finger on the mark – it was hot to the touch. “How did that happen?” she asked slowly.

“Last night I had a nightmare,” said Ellie. “And this girl was there. She was in the tape, too – just for a second, walking away. But she was in my dream, and she scared me, so I was running away from her, but she caught up to me somehow and took my arm. And then I woke up, and I was relieved, until I looked down – and – and saw this –“ She started to cry again. “I can’t sleep. I can’t stay home. I can’t go out. I don’t feel safe anywhere, Athena. I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I think she’s going to kill me tomorrow and I don’t know what to do…”

Athena hugged Ellie again, petted her hair, and tried to go through all of the motions of comforting her, but she didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t sure whether she could believe in all of the supernatural things that Ellie was claiming had happened, but then what did that mean? That Ellie was crazy? And what if the supernatural stuff was true? What could they do about it?

In the end, Athena told Ellie that whatever was happening, it simply didn’t make logical sense that a videotape could cause someone’s death. And if someone was following her, as she thought, then she should contact the police. Ellie didn’t seem entirely convinced, but finally cheered up again by the time that Athena left around 11:00.

And that was when Athena’s paranoia started. On the metro train, riding back out toward Reston, she had her first hallucination. The lights were flickering with the jolts of the train, as though it were tired from a long work-day. Athena was resting her head against the glass window, gazing at the seats at the end of the car without really seeing them. There were not very many people in the car, and she was vaguely aware that they increasingly trickled out the further west the train traveled.

Then the train took a hard turn near Ballston station and the lights went off for a full 5 seconds. Athena was not perturbed by this, but then, when the lights came back on, she found herself looking at a corpse sitting in the horizontal seat by the window – her once-white dress was disheveled and dirty and her arms were a slimy, mottled color. The corpse would have been looking at her, except it was impossible to tell because of the thick, black hair that hung over her face, all the way down to her waist.

Athena jumped and sat upright, and in the moment that she looked away, the apparition disappeared. She breathed heavily, and a man who smelled strongly of cigarettes looked at her strangely from the seat opposite her. She was vaguely comforted by his behavior, since if the ghost had been real, then he would have been just across the aisle from her and would have surely seen her. No, she assured herself, her imagination was just acting up after everything that Ellie had told her. After all, she hadn’t seen the supposedly cursed videotape anyway…

The next day, Athena and the rest of her peers received an email from the president of the university, informing them that Ellie had died earlier that afternoon. The email was very unclear about the cause of her death. Athena asked around, tactfully trying to find the people who were closest to Ellie, and finally found a boy who had been friends with her late boyfriend. He had heard that Ellie was found in her bathroom, cowering against the wall and with a look of terror on her face. Her heart had simply stopped. There were several unexplained elements about her death. First, while her position and expression suggested a struggle of some kind, all of her doors were locked from the inside. A trail of water damage to the carpet seemed to lead from the living room to the bathroom, yet Ellie herself was not wet. And finally, Ellie’s face – in addition to being terror-stricken – bore evidence of having rotted for several weeks, despite the fact that she was found the same day that she had died.

Athena decided that she had to speak up about the videotape, even though she still doubted that it could have possibly had a hand in Ellie’s death. She left an anonymous tip with the number associated with the investigation of the death. During the call, she told the detective that he should search for an unmarked tape in Ellie’s apartment; she explained what Ellie had told her about it, and consequently advised the detective not to watch the videotape without being aware of the risk of death. Naturally, the detective seemed skeptical and even scornful at the idea of a killer videotape, but he agreed to look into it.

When Athena followed up a week later, the same detective told her that they had not found such a videotape _intact_ in the apartment. However, they had found the remains of a burned VHS tape in the trash can. There was no way to reassemble it and examine the images contained within.

At the time, Athena had felt relieved. If there really _was_ a ghost that haunted the videotape, she reasoned, then how could it continue to exist if Ellie had burned its receptacle? Didn’t burning things usually get rid of ghosts in horror movies? As much as she told herself these things, she couldn’t shake off the feelings of fear and malaise that now dogged her when she was alone, and especially the feeling of being watched and followed by someone who wanted something from her…

Athena searched her bedroom last. While she still held her umbrella at the ready, she had also retrieved her Pop-Tart and margarita from the floor, finally resigning herself to the conviction that if there _was_ an actual intruder in her house, she would have been attacked by now.

However, after trip-trapping to the top of the stairs, her malaise returned almost immediately: hadn’t she closed the bedroom door behind her before going downstairs? She couldn’t remember for certain. Now it stood very slightly ajar, the sliver of visible room seemingly taunting her, deliberately drawing her toward danger. As she slid toward the door, taking care not to make the floor creak, she noticed that the floor just before the door was a little wet, gleaming in the moonlight from the window.

Athena threw open the door and entered the room. It was just as she had left it, except for the television. She ignored the television for a moment and prioritized her search of the closet and master bathroom, setting her food and drink down on the bedside table as she went.

When she was satisfied with her search, she stood in front of the TV and considered it. She had left _Maleficent_ on when she went downstairs, intending to return before the end of the commercial break. Now the TV showed static, buzzing and crashing like angry, black-and-white waves.

Perhaps the storm had ruined the reception or something, she thought, but she wasn’t convinced. She fumbled behind her on the bed for the remote and dialed 36, the channel that _Maleficent_ had been playing on.

Oddly, instead of the number that she had dialed, first one 7 and then many more appeared in the upper right-hand corner of the television. As the top line of the television screen filled up with 7’s, they overflowed onto the next line, as though an invisible hand simply held down the 7 button on a keyboard…

“What the…” Athena said, irritated and knocking her remote against her leg. She hit the power button on the remote, but the television would not turn off until 7’s had filled the entire available space on the screen.

She sat on the bed, waited a moment to make sure that the television was done throwing its fit, and then hit the power button again.

Maleficent, swathed in malevolent green light, was telling the king, “I like you begging. Do it again.”

Athena gave a satisfied _hmmph_ , tossed the remote back onto the bed, climbed under the covers, and finally got to enjoy her Pop-Tart and margarita. The accounting textbook lay abandoned on the table. After the shock that she had been through tonight, she reasoned, she could finish the chapter over breakfast.

After the movie was finished, Athena was exhausted. She didn’t even have the energy to take her dishes downstairs or brush her teeth. She simply turned off the television, switched off the lamp on her bedside table, rolled over, and fell almost immediately asleep.

***

She woke quite suddenly in the middle of the night, warm and cozy but with a bladder swollen from alcohol. She groaned at the necessity of getting up, and as she shifted, she felt the shape of Sean’s body behind her, the bony outline of his butt pressing against hers, tucked into the blankets like a burrito as he always slept. She smiled. At least she had their bagel date to look forward to now, which would hopefully dissipate the hangover that she could already feel hardening behind her eyes.

Trying not to disturb Sean, she slid out of bed, took her phone from the bedside table, and used it as a flashlight as she fumbled to the corner of the room that had the bathroom.

She shut the door behind her, hurriedly dropped her panties, and listened to the tremendous splash that her pee made in the toilet. Meanwhile, she checked her phone. She saw that she had a text, but she was more excited to see if anyone had liked the Facebook picture of the silly birthday cake that she had made for Sean with a fox – his favorite animal – on it.

69 likes so far. She grinned when she saw it again, the fox looking slightly demonic because the black icing that had been used for his pupils had smudged beyond the boundary of his eyes and made the eyes look like gaping holes in his skull…

She popped out of Facebook and swiped over to her text messages. The text message was from Sean, and had come in a little after midnight.

“Hey babe, I’m really sorry, but Emmanuel called in, so the boss wants me to do one half of an overnighter. I’ll have to be here ‘til 3:30. I don’t think that I’ll have enough energy for the bagel date after that, so I’ll just crash at my place since it’s closer :/ Hopefully we can get together tomorrow night (or I guess tonight since it’s already tomorrow)? Let me know when you wake up :-* Sweet dreams.”

Athena had to read the message several times before it actually sank in. Then a cold, sick wave of fear swept over her. There was a stranger in her bed.

She didn’t want to go back to her bedroom. She wanted to lock the bathroom door, switch on the light, and stay there until whoever it was in her bed went away…

Who was it? And how had they gotten in so silently, without waking her, the lightest of sleepers? As she pondered these impossible questions, Athena forced her heart to slow down its frantic beating, forced herself to think logically: _I would have heard someone come in._ It seemed far more likely that there was no one in the bed at all, and that her tossing and turning had created a lump of blankets beside her that she had mistaken for Sean’s body, since she had been expecting him.

But she couldn’t shake the realistic feeling of a bony rump pressed against hers under the blankets. She shivered, repulsed by the idea of being that close to a stranger. _But it wasn’t a stranger, you just imagined it,_ she told herself.

Steeling herself with that idea, though only 75% convinced of it, Athena flushed the toilet, washed her hands, and then left the bathroom.

Through the dark room, she peered over at her bed. She could see the dent in the blankets from which she had emerged, and a messy pile of blankets in Sean’s spot. She squinted. Were the blankets displaced enough to permit the possibility of a person lying hidden, underneath them? After a moment of calculation, she felt satisfied. Only a child, and a very emaciated one at that, could possibly hide beneath those blankets without being noticed.

Still, she was very careful as she stepped to her side of the bed and climbed carefully onto it, crawling on her knees. She hesitated to get under the blankets again. She started to slide her hand under the blankets. Very tentatively, she moved her palm across the mattress, warm from where her body had just been, toward the other side of the bed, where the mass of blankets lay.

She had just gotten to the point where she would have encountered Sean’s shoulder on an ordinary night. She felt relieved, and was about to pull her hand back out and get in bed herself, when she felt something strange – a strand or a string of something wet and heavy. Her heart pounding, she moved her hand over a little bit more and found a whole, thick mess of hair – rough and long like a beast’s hair. In terror she felt up towards her pillow and down toward the middle of the bed and felt the hair the whole way, with the vague hardness of a body behind it – what was this thing in her bed?

Disgusted and shaking, she withdrew her hand and took the top of the blanket, peeling it down slowly. Perhaps she could see what this thing was without waking it. She had just started to make out the crown of a head completely covered with black hair when, without warning, a horrible arm leapt from the blankets – a mottled, slimy, rotted arm – and latched itself onto her wrist like a toad’s tongue around a fly. She yelled in shock and pain. At first the hand was cold and soaked, like the feeling you had after getting drenched through with rain – and then it was burning hot. She could almost hear her skin sizzle.

She felt as though something from the dead thing beside her was surging into her – not just heat, but sadness and memory…she was falling…tumbling down a rough-walled hole, impossibly deep. Then she landed in the water. Its stagnant taste invaded her mouth and it bubbled through her nostrils.

Desperately, because she could not swim well, she struggled toward where she thought the surface was – it was difficult to tell because of the total darkness of the place. Just when she felt her right hand splash the surface of the water, another hand grabbed her ankle. Athena kicked at it, broke the surface, and started clawing at the stony walls, trying to find a way out before the creature drowned her…but then she heard a familiar voice, a voice that couldn’t belong to the dark-haired beast, because it was Ellie’s voice.

“Athena…help…down here…” It was faint, and though it appeared to come from beneath the water, Athena could understand the words. Still against the wall, standing on a jutting piece of rock, Athena placed her palms on the surface of the water and swept the dank water to her sides, trying to visually penetrate beneath it.

Something was floating up, something golden and mysteriously glowing. Athena scooped her hand beneath the water and took it up – it was Ellie’s long, blonde hair. Athena held it up out of the water, letting it drip, and wondered why it wasn’t attached to Ellie’s head. Then the strands of hair that she held grew thicker, slimier, and whiter, and began to wriggle in her hand – part of the mass detached itself and wriggled up her arm.

She dropped the mass with a shriek and saw the writhing nest of maggots disappear beneath the black water. She screamed for help, looked up toward the height that she had fallen from, and saw only a cold ring of pale light high above – an opening that had been closed, trapping her –

Athena jerked awake, panting. It took a few minutes to realize that she was back in her bedroom, sprawled diagonally across the bed and with her feet tangled in the blankets. Frantically, she felt all around her for the creature that had been in her bed. Even as she started to feel relief that it had all been a nightmare, she hesitated in her feverish search of the blankets – there was a red mark on her wrist.

She turned her arm beneath her own gaze, studying the mark, which was so clearly a handprint, belonging to a hand with fingers a few inches shorter than her own. It looked just like Ellie’s handprint, the one that Athena had seen on her arm the night before she died.

What did it mean? She couldn’t possibly be about to die, because she hadn’t watched this cursed tape. Despite her unwillingness to acknowledge the truth of such fantastical ideas as ghosts and a cursed tape, she couldn’t help but accept it now that she had tangible evidence burned into her arm.

Athena stood up and made her bed dazedly. As she moved back to her side of the bed, her foot nudged something cold and hard. She looked down and saw her Pop-Tart plate, carefully placed on the floor. _How did it get there?_ she thought. Her eyes fell on the table where she had placed the plate last night, and she saw a blank disk sitting on top of a piece of paper. Very carefully, she took the disk between her fingers and examined it – it was a DVD, but it didn’t have any writing or label on it. Suddenly she remembered Ellie telling her about the blank, unlabeled VHS tape. Was this a digital copy? How had it been made if the original was destroyed?

As she lifted the disk, she saw that there was writing on the paper underneath. While the ink was blurred slightly as though water had dripped on the paper, Athena was able to make out the words, “I can show you where Ellie is,” written in a childish scrawl. She thought of Ellie’s blonde hair floating up to her in that dark hole and dropped the DVD as nausea swept through her.

She stuffed the DVD and paper in her desk so that she wouldn’t have to think about them and busied herself with getting ready for class. After getting dressed and eating a yogurt while finishing her accounting chapter, she slung her backpack over her shoulder and walked outside her townhouse.

“Ah! There you are!” It was Ms. Blaine, from the townhouse next door. She was an older lady who liked to gossip and complain to unsuspecting passerby. Athena suppressed a sigh and tried to think of a way to politely tell Ms. Blaine that she was in a hurry.

“Hello, Ms. Blaine,” she began.

“Yes yes, hello, dear. I wanted to ask you about the new carving you did – I wondered if you got permission from the Association, because if you didn’t, I’m not sure how they’ll feel about it, you know.”

“What carving?” Athena was so surprised that she stopped in her tracks.

Ms. Blaine pointed. “The one on your door. The sun.”

Athena looked at her door. While she could see how Ms. Blaine had mistaken the carving for a sun, Athena knew what it was instantly – it was supposed to be the ring of light that she had seen in her dream, with lines branching off of it to show the steepness of the walls of the well. Yes, she realized now that it must have been a well, since there had been water at the bottom of it. She had never been in a well before, so she hadn’t recognized it at the time, when she was inside. Athena gave herself a mental shake – she _hadn’t_ been inside, she’d _dreamt_ that she had been inside.

“Athena?” Ms. Blaine was looking at her strangely, her wide eyes tinged with impatience.

“I guess someone vandalized my door,” Athena said finally. “I’ll let the Association know so they don’t charge me a fee.”

“And you’d better do it soon, too,” Ms. Blaine chirped with satisfaction, “I figured it might be something like that, I’ve seen those high school boys walking down this way, I bet it was one of their gangs. Hoodlums ought to be locked up.”

Athena wasn’t listening. She was walking toward her car, hitting the unlock button on her keychain, thinking hard. So _that’s_ what the dead girl had scratched on her door last night. Athena felt delirious and panicked from lack of sleep. She didn’t know what to do. The dead girl was already haunting and hurting her (she felt her wrist beneath her long-sleeved shirt) even though she had never watched the cursed tape. If she kept popping up in Athena’s house, in her dreams, then she didn’t see how she could ever sleep easy again. Athena lay her forehead against the steering wheel.

What did she want? To kill again? Company in the afterlife? Or to convey a message that so far no one else had understood? Athena felt her blood pulse through her body, so full of life, but at the same time she felt herself drawn toward the DVD and the hidden pieces of the puzzle that it surely contained along with its threat of death. Maybe if she watched the video, then she’d figure out how to pacify the ghost and get her normal life back. It was a big risk, but the haunting was getting worse and Athena felt that she was running out of options.

Whatever she ended up doing, she would ask Sean’s advice after class today, over lunch. The bagel place was open until 2:00, so they could have their bagel date after all. Consoled by the idea that she wouldn’t have to face this alone, Athena even managed a smile as she drove the rest of the way to school.

 

 


End file.
